The Story Behind the Dress

In November 1997, Monica Lewinsky told her confidant and supposed friend, Linda Tripp that she had in her possession a blue Gap dress that still bore the semen stain that resulted from her administering oral sex to President Clinton in February of that year.

Tripp called her literary agent, and fellow Clinton-hater, Lucianne Goldberg to report the news that evidence existed in Lewinsky’s closet that could prove a sexual relationship between Monica and the President. Goldberg and Tripp, according to published reports in both Time and Newsweek, discussed stealing the dress and turning it over to investigators. Goldberg admitted having such a discussion with Tripp, calling it a “Nancy Drew fantasy.”

In late November, Lewinsky mentioned to Tripp that she intended to have the dress, which she had been saving as a souvenir, dry-cleaned for a family event. Tripp, anxious to preserve the dress to nail the President, discouraged her from doing so. “I would tell my own daughter,” Tripp told her, that she should save the dress “for your own ultimate protection” should she later be accused of lying about the affair with Clinton. When Lewinsky expressed skepticism that it would ever come to that, Tripp told her that the dress made her look “really fat” and she shouldn’t wear it again in public.

When Brenda heard the news, truth about the botched circumcision she cut her hair and changed her name to David. In order to undo the changes David’s body had gone through as Brenda with estrogen therapy, he had a double mastectomy as well as surgeries to construct male genitals, and began receiving testosterone injections.

A Tale of Sex Science and Abuse

The Boy Who Was Raised as A Girl

On 22 August 1965 Janet Reimer was granted her dearest wish: she gave birth to twins. The two boys, Brian and Bruce, were healthy babies, but they would lead tragic lives, blighted by one scientist’s radical theory. Bruce would later rename himself David.

David Reimer was one of the most famous patients in the annals of medicine. The story of David is a terribly sad one. He had also been both a boy and a girl, thanks to one of the darker episodes in the history of pseudoscientific hubris. David was born as a boy named Bruce. He had an identical twin, Brian. David had to undergo a transformation that he had no say in when he was just a baby.

David, and his brother each had a minor medical problem involving his penis, and a doctor decided to treat the problem with circumcision. The doctor botched the circumcision on David, using an inappropriate method and accidentally burning off virtually David?s entire penis.?A malfunction in the doctor?s equipment (electrocautery needle) caused the needle to burn Reimer?s penis from tip to base.

The Reimers were left with a dilemma: a son with no penis. They visited several medical experts who assured them that penile reconstruction would prove worthless. The Reimers were at a loss as to how to help David.?Most of his penis was burned off, and reconstructive surgery was too primitive at the time to restore it. Dr. John Money, a sexologist at Johns Hopkins University, persuaded Reimer’s parents to have their son completely castrated and raised as a girl that they renamed Brenda.

David’s parents (farm adolescents barely out of their teens) were referred to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, home of the world’s leading expert in gender identity, psychologist Dr. John Money, who recommended a surgical sex change, from male to female. David’s parents eventually agreed to the radical procedure, believing Dr. Money’s claims that this was their sole hope for raising a child who could have heterosexual intercourse?albeit as a sterile woman with a synthetic vagina and a body feminized with estrogen supplements.

A plastic sheet, padded sides and mounted on wheels: The ‘rape bed’ pervert polygamist Warren Jeffs ordered to be made for his compound. Warren Jeffs gave specific instructions on his bed, saying that it should be padded and long enough to hold him and there should be a plastic cover on the mattress to ‘protect from what will happen.’

?Heavenly Sessions?

The largest polygamist community in America is run by a madman in jail?

Warren Jeffs” is the fundamentalist Mormon leader who spent more than a year on the FBI?s ?10 Most Wanted List? for unlawful flight on charges related to his alleged arrangement of illegal marriages involving underage girls. Jeffs, accused of being married to 78 women?24 of them under 17?is one of the most manipulative criminal masterminds of the decade.

Jeffs? rise to power happened after the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs. Within days of his father?s passing, Warren married all of his father?s wives and dictatorial control over his polygamist followers ensued. He demanded women in the sect be completely subservient to men, banned laughing, and ?reassigned? wives to other men at whim.

Jeffs was eventually charged as an accomplice to rape for arranging underage marriages but fled prosecution. After a year-long manhunt, he was finally apprehended in Texas and brought back to trial. The courtroom testimony of two brave young women who escaped his reign of terror ensured he would finally be convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Even to this day with their leader behind bars, members of his polygamist cult still believe that he is the prophet chosen by God himself.

The Windsors meeting Hitler.?Edward adored her. He had met her in 1931 when he was Prince of Wales, and she was married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson. It was not long before they were in love. ?My own beloved Wallis?, he wrote in 1935, ?I love you more & more & more & more? I haven?t seen you once today & I can?t take it. I love you?.

The Woman Who Could Not Be Queen

American socialite Wallis Simpson became the mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales. Edward abdicated the throne to marry her, a period known as the Abdication Crisis.

Of all the scandalous women in history, Wallis Simpson is probably one of the most vilified, the most fascinating, and the most misunderstood.?The Duchess of Windsor has been accused of being a lesbian, a nymphomaniac, a Nazi spy, and a man.

Since she first made a splash on the international stage in the 1930s, interest in her has only grown, thanks in no small part to the success of films and television shows in recent years.

People have imagined Simpson as everything from a victim?to a romantic heroine and fashion icon, and she has even been accused of being a seductress and a Nazi spy.

This American socialite became notorious for her affair with Prince Edward. Edward was not just any old prince: he was the eldest son and heir of his father, King George V, and was thus next in line to the throne of the United Kingdom. His obsession with Simpson did not lessen when he become King Edward VIII in 1936 – he was so besotted with her that he actually went through the trouble of abdicating the throne so that he could marry her.

Known as the Duke and?Duchess of Windsor after Edward’s abdication, the couple captured the public’s imagination. The public saw their love affair as a storybook fantasy, and the couple became the poster children of romance winning out over duty and defying the contempt of the government.

There is no consensus about Wallis Simpson’s motivations or even some details about her private life. But there are enough tantalising, fascinating facts about this woman to keep historians intrigued.

Anna Fallarino, in February 1970, at the behest of her husband, was one of the first women in Italy to undergo in a Roman clinic in a breast augmentation with silicone implants, along with a tummy tuck reductive.

Italy’s Forbidden ‘Orgy Island’

With its emerald-green waters, blue skies and a rugged empty landscape, Zannone has everything you’d expect from a near-deserted Italian island.

It also has a reputation for something rather more unexpected: Orgies.?The rugged island is home to nothing but a white house and the dilapidated secret retreat of the sex-obsessed Marquis and his wife.

But in the late 60s, it was a hub of adultery, heavy drinking and orgies. ?Locals knew the dark secrets of the racy goings-on at the villa in Zannone and its beaches.

“See that white colonial villa up high there?” says former fisherman Giorgio Aniello as he points a rough finger at a clifftop villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Zannone became a hotspot for ?lavish sex parties??after ?chic and sexually adventurous aristocratic couple? Marquis Casati Stampa and Anna Fallarino rented it from the state.?Stampa apparently enjoyed?watching his wife with other guys and they would frequently host dukes, barons, countesses, billionaires and other VIPs to partake in such activities.

Aniello is a regular visitor to Zannone, taking tourists on boat trips to the wildest atoll among the Pontine archipelago off the west coast of Italy.

The big attraction, aside from the island’s natural beauty, is its dark, sexy past, most of which centres around the Marquis and his wife Anna Fallarino, a former actress.

“He was a lewd man, a voyeur who liked to watch and photograph his starlet wife get kinky having sex with with other younger guys,” Aniello adds, enjoying spinning R-rated tales as he navigates a maze of reddish-yellow cliffs, old stone fisheries and sea stacks.

“Then one day he got fed up of the threesome, shot the two lovers and killed himself.”

Maneater: Theda Bara in a series of unconventional portraits. Her publicist claimed it was her lover and that not even the grave could separate them.

Theda Bara?

?The Vamp? of the Silent Screen

?A vampire is a good woman with a bad reputation, or rather a good woman who has had possibilities and wasted them?

?? Florenz Ziegfeld

The queen of the vamps was one of America?s most mysterious movie stars ? Theda Bara. The magnetic actress, with her steely gaze and jet-black hair, was the prototype for a movie bad girl. She shook convention so dramatically that a critic called her a ?flaming comet of the cinema firmament.?

Bara might be the most significant celebrity pioneer whose movies you?ve never seen. She was the movie industry?s first sex symbol; the first femme fatale; the first silent film actress to have a fictional identity invented for her by publicists and sold through a receptive media to a public who was happy to be conned; and she might have been America?s first homegrown goth.

According to the studio biography, Theda Bara (anagram of “Arab Death”) was born in the Sahara to a French artiste and his Egyptian concubine and possessed supernatural powers.

In the late 1910s, women were on the verge of winning the right to equal representation in the voting booth. Women were asserting power in unions, and, in the wake of disasters like the?Triangle Factory Fire, those unions were influencing government policy. They were taking control of their destinies, their fortunes, even their sexuality (Margaret Sanger?s first birth control clinic opened in 1916).

This surging independence came just as the entertainment industry heralded the female form as one of its primary attractions. Ziegfeld?s sassy, flesh-filled?Follies?? and its many imitators ? defined the Broadway stage, mixing music, sex and glamour with a morality-shattering frankness.

But it was the birth of motion pictures that gave the allure of female bodies an unearthly, flickering glow, as nickelodeon shorts became feature-length films, and the first era of the movie siren was born.

Combine the power of liberation with the erotic potential of cinema, and in the late 1910s, you got the vampire (or as we would come to know, the ?vamp?).

Tallulah Dahling

“Hello, Dahling . . . I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock. If I’m late start without me.”
Her voice, her wit, and her face were captivating.

On why she called everyone?dahling?she stated that she was terrible with names and once introduced a friend of hers as Martini. ?Her name was actually Olive.

Tallulah, with her signature ?dah-ling?s and her notorious peccadilloes and her endlessly caricatured baritonal gurgle of a voice?a voice that was steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning?would be easy to dismiss as a joke if she hadn?t also been a woman of outsize capacities. As it is, the story of her life reaches beyond gossip and approaches tragedy.
It was Tallulah’s real-life behaviour that really got people’s attention.

Tallulah’s scandalous career began at her seminary when, aged twelve, she fell in love with Sister Ignatius.? As she grew to adulthood she developed her romantic and sexual interests in a way which can really only be called trisexual: she would bed heterosexual men, preferably well hung, women and homosexual men, again preferably well-hung.? She stumbled across this life unprepared but took to it with enthusiasm and a breathtaking lack of concern for the proprieties.? She once said: ?My father always warned me about men, but he never said anything about women!? And I don?t give a stuff what people say about me so long as they say something!?? She managed to keep them talking for the rest of her life, but her most admirable trick was always to pre-empt the insidious leakage of malicious gossip with reflexive innuendos so frank as to seem hardly believable.? Personal eccentricities, such as the refusal ever to wash her hair in anything other than Energine dry-cleaning fluid, probably helped to create the conditions in which she then felt able to defy more serious conventions in riskier ways.

He rightly pointed out that today’s overly aggressive digital pornography world does not reflect real relationships, and that “there doesn’t appear to be such a thing as consent”.

The prestigious Auckland school has introduced a healthy relationships programme to tackle these very issues. It should be applauded. And its example followed.

As O’Connor signalled, the sexual behaviour our teens are engaging in or being subjected to can have a long-lasting impact.

To blame porn on the Internet for rape culture would be the same as blaming murders and wars on the six o’clock news. ?It assumes that the teenager doesn’t live as part of a family that has been living and demonstrating respect for the law, respect for others, and especially respect for self. ? Read more »

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

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Seymour, Bisset is looking at you … Worsley, his wife and Bisset had once attended a bath-house in the town and, while Lady Worsley was getting dressed, her husband had allowed Bisset to climb on his shoulders to ogle her half-naked form through a window.

Sex, Scandal and Divorce

?Lady Worsley had 27 lovers and Sir Richard was a Voyeur, a Pervert, a Deviant

The Battle between Sir Richard Worsley and George Bisset

In 1782, the chattering classes of Britain and the United States were held transfixed by the trial of George Bisset for criminal conversation. The transcript had seven printings in the first year–even George Washington requested one.

Lady Worsley ran off with her husband?s best friend, Captain George Bisset and by March 1782, their names and cartoon images were plastered all over London. Sir Richard was a voyeur who used to pimp Lady Worsley out to his friends, and then tried to unsuccessfully sue Bisset for 20,000 pounds in a Criminal Conversation, or adultery trial. The couple took great pains to completely ruin each other ? and the public loved it. They queued outside booksellers shops for copies of the trial transcripts and the newspapers covered the farce for months. Poems and pamphlets of purported exploits were printed and hungrily consumed all that year and in the years to follow.

What legal options were available to the cuckolded husbands of 18th-century England? Divorce was a fantastically costly, excruciatingly public business, and only really viable for those blessed with deep pockets and lofty social rank.

The so-called parliamentary divorce was one possibility, which obliterated the marital union and left the parties free to re-marry.

However, there was also the solution dispensed by the ecclesiastical court of Doctors’ Commons: a legal separation of “bed and board” might be pronounced, but the former husband and wife were not then entitled to find new spouses. This was the vengeful cuckold’s first port of call: a wife who was unable to remarry stood an excellent chance of falling into penury.

What, though, of the scoundrel who had ravished her? Here the concept of “criminal conversation” – a euphemistic way of saying “having adulterous sex” – came to the fore.